Back then I wanted an easy URL that I could give to car show attendees and my friends and family ‘back home’ so that I could easily share images from this crazy car show, Cars and Coffee. In the first few months of existence I would get excited when a hundred people visited the site. That gave way to numbers in the thousands.

Nowadays I no longer look.

The site has been through four different hosting companies. The initial host was GoDaddy, then I switched to 1and1 briefly, then dreamhost and now the images are hosted at smugmug. Also it is a victim of its own success. Too much traffic and routers start to melt.

There are something over 85,000 photographs now in the gallery. We are utilizing 112GB of disk space on our host. The performance could be better at times. The next step may need to be a custom solution.

Some time ago I was joined by Chuck, Leo and Steve. Each of us have our own style and interests. I think that the four of us complement each other, even if from time to time I do feel like the weakest link. Leo has taken up the role of ‘socialite’, he posts the photographs in a small number of significant forums each week and keeps the facebook page up-to-date on a regular basis. Leo is also a major contributor of photographs from other events. We are all looking forwards to the latest installment of the Bell City ‘Lowe Riders and Things’ show this year.

The rest of us fulfill roles – Steve is the arty one, Chuck is the early bird that gets the majority of the arrival shots and me ?  Well I guess I am the webmaster.

In the last thirty days the site served up over two million images. That is insane.

A part of me says that there must be a way that we can monetize that, just to cover the hosting costs perhaps. But then the other part of me points out that I block adverts on my phone, in my browser and I tend to record TV shows to void the adverts. I hate adverts, so why should I assume that the thousands of fans of the site would be OK with me subjecting them to advertizing ?

So we carry on.

I am proud to be a part of this site, it is not really ‘mine’ anymore, it belongs to all of us, not just the contributors, but to those that view our photos and comment on the various threads.

Today we are adding the ability to blog, hopefully we will post here occasionally and if anyone has something to add, well the comments threads will be open.

Thank you to everyone for making this as crazy as it is….

~Max~